TY  - JOUR
AU  - Riehl, Evan
AU  - Saavedra, Juan E
AU  - Urquiola, Miguel
TI  - Learning and Earning: An Approximation to College Value Added in Two Dimensions
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 22725
PY  - 2016
Y2  - October 2016
DO  - 10.3386/w22725
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w22725
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w22725.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Evan Riehl
Department of Economics
Cornell University
266 Ives Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
E-Mail: eriehl@cornell.edu

Juan Saavedra
Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research
University of Southern California
635 Downey Way
Los Angeles, CA 90089
Tel: 213/821-2782
E-Mail: juansaav@usc.edu

Miguel Urquiola
Economics Department
Columbia University
420 W 118TH ST #1022
New York, NY 10027
New York, NY 10027
Tel: 212/854-3769
Fax: 212/854-8059
E-Mail: msu2101@columbia.edu
M1  - published as Evan Riehl, Juan E. Saavedra, Miguel Urquiola. "Learning and Earning: An Approximation to College Value Added in Two Dimensions," in Caroline M. Hoxby and Kevin Stange, editors, "Productivity in Higher Education" University of Chicago Press (2019)

AB  - This paper explores the implications of measuring college productivity in two different dimensions: earning and learning. We compute system-wide measures using administrative data from the country of Colombia that link social security records to students’ performance on a national college graduation exam. In each case we can control for individuals’ college entrance exam scores in an approach akin to teacher value added models. We present three main findings: 1) colleges’ earning and learning productivities are far from perfectly correlated, with private institutions receiving relatively higher rankings under earning measures than under learning measures; 2) earning measures are significantly more correlated with student socioeconomic status than learning measures; and 3) in terms of rankings, earning measures tend to favor colleges with engineering and business majors, while colleges offering programs in the arts and sciences fare better under learning measures.
ER  -